On 22nd May 2017, 22 people were brutally murdered at Manchester Arena. Below is an article I wrote on 24th May last year. I republish it as I believe it still has relevance today.
We need to fight much harder to extinguish this barbarous Islamist evil
I am still very angry. It’s an anger that refuses to go away despite a good night’s sleep. I can’t get the image of Saffie-Rose Roussos, an eight year-old girl who had her life in front of her, out of my head. She had just enjoyed what was probably the best evening of her young life. She was allowed to stay up late and see her favourite singer at a pop concert. She would have been high as a kite with sheer exuberance. I can imagine her walking out of the auditorium thinking that life can’t get any better than this.
And then we know what happened next. Short of deliberately targeting a maternity hospital, how debased can you get?
I am tired of hearing people describe what happened on Monday evening as a tragedy. It wasn’t a tragedy. It wasn’t just one of those things. It was an atrocity. Children – young children – have been brutally murdered.
Others who survived have the most horrific images in their minds – images that will never leave them. Parents will feel guilty. They will feel they have let their children down – that they have failed in their duty to protect them. It may be irrational, but that is the way many of them will feel.
A moment of the most barbarous evil that anyone could imagine will have a profound impact not just on the family and friends of those murdered, but on everyone else (including the family and friends) who were there that night.
There are over 300 verses in the Koran that expressly order Muslims to kill Christians and Jews wherever they find them. Of course, the majority of Muslims do not do this – many of those who call themselves Muslims do so for cultural, rather than religious, reasons. Muslims are fair game to ISIS. They are victims of ISIS. Unless you adhere to this absolute form of Islam, you are a target.
But – and it is a hugely important but – there are a significant minority of Muslims who hate Western liberal democracy so much that they will do anything to extinguish it. By anything, I mean anything, and that includes targeting thousands of happy little children attending a pop concert.
Islam was born in bloodshed. It has tried, and failed, on a number of occasions to take over Europe. It was defeated in 732 by Charles Martel at Tours. It was defeated by the Knights of St John in Malta in 1565. The list goes on until the most recent attack in 1683 – 11 September 1683, to be precise – when it was defeated at the gates of Vienna.
Was every Muslim in the world wanting to take over Europe and make Sharia Law the law of the land in every European country? Of course not. Does every Muslim want it now? Of course not. But as I have already said, there are enough of them who do. It is not Islamaphobic to expect law abiding Muslims to do more to root out this evil in our society. It’s not Buddhist monks strapping explosives to themselves at pop concerts. Just like countries, all religions have some parts of their history that they are not proud of, but it isn’t Jews, Christians, Hindus, or Sikhs trying to destroy our way of life.
The modus operandi of Islamists has changed, but the hatred towards Judaeo-Christian civilisation and values has not.
There are far too many Muslims who turn a blind eye to extremism. According to Pew Research, 35 per cent of British Muslims aged 18-29 believe suicide bombings against civilians “can be justified”. The figure is higher in France (42 per cent), and lower in the United States (26 per cent). That is an astonishingly high number of people, and I don’t believe for one moment that they are not known to their family, friends, and others in their mosque.
I will not be attending a candlelight vigil – as well meaning as one of those events is. I am not going to shout from a microphone that were are stronger than the evil that extinguished the lives of so many on Monday evening. That is as irrelevant as it is true. I am not going to regurgitate the usual platitudes doled out when evil terrorists destroy more human lives. Nor am I going to thank those Muslims who get their photographs taken holding up signs saying, “Not in our name”. We are really past all of those things.
I want these bastards taken off the streets. I want them and their vile ideology wiped off the face of the earth. I am not bothered how it is done, as long as it is done. Everyone must do their part, and it must be made clear that if you know anyone with extremist tendencies and do not report them to the police, you are just as bad as they are. If they go on to murder, then you are just as complicit as they are.
We should be fighting to protect Western civilisation. At the moment, we are not doing anywhere near as much as we should.
Photo Credit: By Ardfern [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], from Wikimedia Commons